Dynamic Semantics Negotiation in Ditributed and Evolving Software Systems: Towards Automated Semantic-Directed System Configuration
Torsten Meyer
ISBN 978-3-89722-369-1
316 Seiten, Erscheinungsjahr: 2000
Preis: 40.50 €
A major challenge in developing contemporary distributed software systems is
dynamic accommodation of evolutionary change: modifications not envisaged at
design time have to be handled at run time without disturbing those parts of
the system unaffected by the change. The key feature of configuration
management realizing such dynamic modifications and extensions is that
semantic information about the constituent components has to be available in
order to check the compliance wrt. adding a new or changed component. The
aim of this thesis is to go beyond the currently available plug-in
architectures such as CORBA, Java RMI or DCOM where the semantics of public
interfaces is often only implicit or represented by very naive descriptions
such as keyword lists or simple name/value pairs. The goal of these ideas is
to achieve semantics-directed configuration of component based software
systems in such a way that components organize themselves on the basis of a
richer representation of their semantics concepts.
The main emphasis of this thesis lies on introducing different negotiation
strategies and configuration protocols on top of semantics-directed
component interaction. The final aim is automating most of this
semantics-driven configuration process.
This thesis introduces the concepts for semantics negotiation and
semantics-directed system configuration based on distributed graph
transformation. Several non-trivial sample systems and case studies are
presented in order to illustrate how the approach works. Finally, an
overview of the tool environment implementing these ideas is given.